Savoring life. Writing on experiences. Moments and milestones in equal measure.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Are you home already?

Christmas is here.
2016 is gone. Well, almost gone. In a few days – that we will barely notice
pass by because we will be all into celebrating and passing out – it will be a
memory. Some will look back at it with sneer for the pain it has caused them. To
put this in perspective, last week I asked someone close to me how her
resolutions have shaped up through the year and she literally face palmed! She
simply said, “At least I am alive Wesh”. And there is the catch. It means she
got nothing going as planned but she’s all good with the fact that 2016 is over.
The year wrecked her bad and now she is part of those who will simply sneer at
it.

Others will
definitely be fading in on the edge of paradise when beautiful nostalgia hits
them as they reminisce 2016 and its good tidings. Like my friends who got
hitched this year, akina Kay,
William, Nash, and Makokha.

Then some will
want nothing to do with it. Like a bad omen, they will bury it in the ‘kaburi la sahau’ and seek supernatural
indulgence to rid themselves of any misfortunes they might have dragged over from
2016.

***

My heart goes out to
all those lives that we lost in the Naivasha tragedy. The lives of the men and
women who woke up to go about their business with no idea it would be their
last day to be with us. To walk the earth. I really don’t know what you tell a
man who has lost two daughters and a brother all at once. Or parents to a
couple that were on their way to honeymoon. May their souls rest in eternal
peace.

***

And I also admit
this year for me has not been all highs. There are moments when I have crawled
in the shadows of disappointment and borne the staleness of dark days. Days
when even my lucky socks wouldn’t help. (I have lucky socks people). I wore
them this one dark day and I still lost a thao
at an ATM machine. A thousand bob gone like that. Puff! Damn those socks! But
really, I am referring to bigger issues of course. I am talking of days when
neither kachumbari-topped mutura nor
those samosas I eat at nicks could help. Even a massage couldn’t do it. Days
that simply left a sour taste in my mouth. The kind of days I would scroll
through my gram timeline and see those life quotes over flowery pictures or
sunset photos and be like, “gerrarahia man”. The quotes would not mean much.

But all those are now
memories and my friends and I are still slaying over here.

So Christmas is
here. How would you know? Well, there are dead giveaways. Just look around at
the decorations. Everywhere. Garden city is magical with the enchanting lights,
the Kamau guy hired to play Santa,
the decorated trees and the enticing holiday sale banners. I actually tend to
think Garden City peeps are living up to their ‘city of dreams’ slogan. Then I
passed over at TRM on Friday to pay my landlord, Kinoti, his dues and either I
have the wrong idea of paradise or TRM has somehow received a fax from the man up
there giving them tips on what befits the word ‘heavenly’. Or I am just
exaggerating. But the décor is impressive.

Then there are the
families. Kids are all over the place with beaming faces, ice cream guys making
a kill on this, women in heeled shoes stacking things they probably don’t need
in trolleys at Nakumatt and their men walking behind them with sulky faces from
all the draining on the credit cards. Of course you’ll know the ones who’ll go
nuts in January went ahead and thought carrying a debit cards over that holiday
trip to Diani was not a bad idea at all.

But the most
explicit part about this Christmas season is the traveling. Has anybody called
you to ask “hujaenda ocha bado”? That
call will somehow come up. We all get into the travel frenzy around this
season. Hell even some of us – us here means western fellas (akina Kuchio and Matendechere) – carry
their beds and sofa seats all the way to Butula and them come back with them in
January! And are you going home by the way?

I know its cliché
but I want to know where you call home. I want to know because I am just from a
call with someone who I asked this question and to them there is ocha where parents and siblings are then
there is home where their heart finds tranquil. Where their heart is not
bleeding. And by the way it sucks the soul out of me when I hear the depravity
in someone’s voice as they try to explain why they are swimming against the
tide to people who only know reason as swimming with the tides.

Explaining why ‘home’
is not home for them.

So where is home?

A million ways to
put this but indulge me in my perspective.

For me, flowers or
flower gardens or flower bushes, are the most astounding of preachers on the
state of being home.

Let first just
talk flowers.

I oddly used to
admire, still do, how flowers grow and live in their tribes and bloom over vast
fields and wild groves. Even more I admire how each flower though constrained
in a vastness of hundreds of others manages to stand out alone. And not the
kind of standing alone that resounds ‘degenerate’. No. The standing alone that
resounds accomplishment, like great men, men that tangle solitude and success
together. In their natural form, flowers sway against winds that carry stories
and secrets in equal measure but remain unmoved as their roots delve deep in
the earth. And in all this strength and privilege such flowers are not lost on
their course, they simply aim at a single thing; to excel in what their laws
finds graceful, to be true to their form, to be the door through which nature
smiles at us.

When you root out
flowers from the ground they don’t hide anything. They show their struggle by
their roots; the lengths they have gone to in order to sustain the beauty above
the ground; the twists and turns beneath the ground; dodging rocks and all.
Surprisingly in the most rugged grounds you find the most impressive flowers.

Think of these
flowers preaching,

“I really don’t
know who bore me. In our family we simply spread as pollen. Our fathers and our
children are family but are also strangers to us. They may be here or far away.
My family is thus all these flowers around me whether we rose from the same
pollen grain or not. They are family because they are what I got for now. We
stick together and refuse to die in storms. And all I do here is to live out to
my full term. I share my secrets and pain with them and I keep my labour holy.
I shine in the sun and look pretty in the rain. It’s what we do. We prevail in
this and in this I have built my trust. A form of trust that carries my life.”

A flower is thus simply
paying its eternal dues. Mother Nature puts the small plant through hell. But
that only serves to refine the damn thing. To tighten the ‘family’ bond. In the
end the uniqueness of each flower is curved out better in the face of
adversity. After the stormy night, nothing looks better than a bunch – ‘family’
– of flowers in the morning sun. Their details are orgasmic.

I know this is prolly starting to sound like those
inspirational novels but hang in there, we are headed somewhere.

Ask any bride
about the power of a flower and they will give you stories for days. Or ask a
girl what a single rose can do and they will let you know of the inexplicable
feeling that those red petals carry. Roses do things to hearts of women. And
why are we happy when we are surrounded by flowers? I guess it’s because they
remind us of our idea of homes. Flowers somehow feed our illusion of
perfection. Actually a bouquet of flowers having flowers cut and trimmed
together should tell you what family is all about. We all want to be like
flowers; the centre of admiration; the focal point of those expensive Nikon
cameras. Cameras owned by kick ass photographers kamaSiloma.

So we go back to
the question, where is home?

In my view, I
think home is many things and one thing too.

Home can be somewhere
we are headed, where we ought to be, and not really places where we have come
from. Indeed as a flower rises from past it has no idea of, some of us rise
from pasts that also remain vague to us sometimes. We have roots in mud and
rusty places. Roots that carry our scars and our struggles but then these are not
home.

Home can be our
crew; the niggas around you; the girlfriends you gossip with; the chama chics
that you are building empires together or that person you confide in. The can
be your family. And our aim in these families, as is in flowers, is to stand out
at the end with a trail of success behind us and on a peak graced with peace. This
is home.

Home can also be
the moments we share with the people we love and not really the place where
these people are. It could be the journey we have to go through to create these
moments. As flowers do, maybe remaining true to our form, our goal, and our
purpose would be the perfect way to being at this home. To creating homely
moments in time.

Home can also be a
feeling of safety and comfort. Like my phone-call friend’s idea of home.

Or it could also
be the place where we get to wander around in boxers, play loud music, dance weirdly
to Mercy Masika’s Mwema, eat unhealthy stuff and hold the serving spoon and sing Karaoke
like a dying walrus. (I don’t do any of these).

And in the end?

Well when we, like
flowers, realise what is home for us then we become other people’s idea of
home. We become a glimpse of paradise to those around us. We make them have an
idea of what family is about. We show them that family is about those that
stand with us, shape us to be better and those that fit in our garland: whether
our veins run the same blood or not.

Home is high up in the clouds..my head is there..I love to travel.Home is in my messy house in the Netherlands, I feel free to do anything..leave my bed unmade, leave the dishes unwashed, lie in bed on weekends for as long as I want..I am the queen of that tiny queendom..though when people want to visit, they have to make an appointment, so I can have time to scrub the house real good, to make an impression on them that I am tidy when I am not.